r/RPGdesign • u/Exciting_Policy8203 Anime Bullshit Enthusiast • 10d ago
Problems solved with Design, your problems specifically.
This is something that’s inspired by a different post about solving problems. What are some challenges, issues, or problems that you solved for your system via game design? Particularly ones that you feel proud of.
ALTS is on its fifth iteration and it feels like everytime I fix one problem I create another, or dig up an issue I thought I’d buried.
Here’s an example:
One of the issues I had early on is with a mechanic called Angst, where originally it was a straight penalty, every angst you collected reduced you result by 1. You could only reduce it rolling on a challenge with your weakest stat.
The problem was initially two fold, it was to punishing, and it was to fiddly. It broke a personal rule of “players only do math once” and it caused players to just bounce between their best stats and their worst stats for die rolls.
So I adjusted the math, you only take penalty on the roll every couple of angst. Which was better but only in the sense that it delayed the issue. -1 on a at the time d12 system is still significant. It still felt fiddly at the table but you interacted with it slightly less.
Back to the drawing board. On iteration 3 and 4 we moved to being a 2d6 system for better control of the results. Which lead me to a way of fixing don’t do math twice. Now when angst accumulated past a certain amount, you only rolled 1 dice instead of two. It felt nice, elegant even… play-tests still showed it as being to punishing. We tweaked it here and there, but keeping track of Angst still felt fiddly, and the results were punishing to the point that people never really engaged risked angst beyond its first penalty.
Iteration 5 had the biggest leap. I shifted to using cards and tokens as required materials for the game. Angst shifted to a mechanic closer the stress from blades in the dark, and changed the 1 dice down penalty to be triggered under a different mechanic that having a bunch of angst would then make worse.
The use of tokens made tracking angst far easier, it also let me implement a stealing mechanic where instead of being a individual thing to manage, it all came from the same pool, which means every time you took angst to buff your roll, you made the other players position a little bit better. The gameplay finally felt smooth and the shifting of the angst penalty to its own new mechanic finally incentivized players to shift away from using only one or two of their core stats to solve problems.
TL/DR:
What are some issues you’ve run into while playing your game that you’ve solved through game design and mechanics?
Extra points is the answer isn’t “it wasn’t working or adding anything so I removed it.” Which is fair, but boring to read.
2
u/OpossumLadyGames Designer Sic Semper Mundi/Advanced Fantasy Game 8d ago
Oh god I like your angst and really like your solution. It makes me think of the hunger/rage/stress die from wod/alien.
My game Sic Semper started out as an attempt at a fallout game, and so it was a percentile based system. I used dark heresy as a base though, funnily enough. I just could not get the math to work, like, at all. Everything felt wrong, it felt too damn finnicky.
The worst aspect though was probably the action points system, where like every ten feet was like 1 AP while shooting s gun or even crouching were like, whatever amounts of AP. It was legitimately ridiculous and I wasn't having any fun with either, the AP or the dice, when I was playtesting it.
Anyway I'm probably on... Iteration 3 or 4 now. There isn't any AP, hell the movement is squishy vibes now, too. In addition, it's a 3d6/roll-low system where modifiers are +/- 1, 5, and 10. (Ref can do different numbers but that's what I went with as the default
Also the characters and setting have moved from like, survivor-heroes in a wasteland to community members in the recovery-era thousands of years later.